Siemens Science Competition: doing science in a community

Why would high school students choose to spend their time doing research in a …

People outside the research community tend not to recognize that it really is a community—science is a social activity, and you tend to spend your days interacting with the other members of your research group, other members of your institution, and collaborators from around the world. The youngest of the people around is typically a grad student, meaning that might be a tough place for a high school student to feel comfortable. But, talking with the students, we found that most had a fantastic experience interacting with their fellow scientists.

Working with scientists

This sense of community may have helped keep the students in the lab long enough to pursue a prize-winning project. The students who made it this far in the competition faced a lot of the same time pressures the rest of us do, and had to choose to do research instead of playing sports or computer games (or any other typical teenage activity). So, we also asked a few about making that choice.

Stay tuned on Sunday, when we'll run some clips of the more unexpected things that came out in the interviews.